What can you tell us about the market you are addressing?
France and BeNeLux are extremely diverse when it comes to payments. In France, card transactions are prevailing for e-commerce, with 80.1% of the total revenues generated through card transactions in 2019. Also, the 3DS secure 2-Factor-Authentication has already been in place for a long time. For the country, the real challenge resides in accelerating its migration from legacy banking infrastructure to more robust and highly configurable systems, in order to take advantage of the faster growth in EMV® e-commerce transactions expected in the years to come; and to propose innovative digital offerings to their clients.
In BeNeLux, the account-to-account, P2P and wallet payments are some of the dominants in e-commerce. While developing the credit card offering, the new regulations represent an additional non-negligible cost. In a market where the actors and consumers are more digitally oriented, they will look more for innovative and business-flexible partners to support them.
Some of the banks of France and BeNeLux are engaged in EPI. What are your thoughts about it?
The European Payment Initiative (EPI) is a great step to create a policy truly geared towards the digital. This is interesting because it’s emerging at the same time as a strong consolidation of major payment processors in Europe. We are looking forward to the opportunities that will come from it and plan to play a part in the process by bringing our insights into the building of such a highly strategic project, in which technical aspects should not be forgotten to make it a success.
How can Netcetera help its clients?
Netcetera benefits from a special positioning in the market as we are an independent technical solution provider. This allows us to really focus on our products and push their features to answer the technical and functional needs for our clients, so that they can benefit from digital transformation.
In the last few years, we’ve seen new specifications and products emerging rapidly in payment, making it more difficult for our clients to stay on top of the latest trends. Therefore, the first mission of Netcetera is to support the industry in understanding the technical challenges ahead, when it comes to payment and regulation. In parallel, we are heavily engaged in upcoming technologies like Delegated Authentication or One Click payment experience to combine regulation requirements with a convenient and outstanding consumer experience. That’s why we organize regular public webinars and private workshops to share our knowledge and deliver the key insights needed to make the optimal technical and business decisions. It is only when we understand our clients’ challenges and expectations that we are in a position to become their solution provider.
You recently announced the opening of your first office in France and BeNeLux, can you tell us more about it?
The years 2019/2020 were focused on assessing the market’s interest for our products and solutions. After establishing our first collaborations, a strong correlation of what Netcetera has to offer and the current needs and expectations of the market clearly emerged. By opening this first office in the region, we are sending a strong signal to our customers of our willingness to support them in their projects with local technical support.
Our first office, opening in December 2020, will be located in Paris to get closer to our main clients and prospects. Nevertheless, the flexibility, entrepreneurship and market focus demonstrated by Netcetera’s organization through this challenging time showed us how well prepared we are to set up a non-centralized organization, and to recruit new talent remotely. Our focus will be on welcoming the best talents and growing accordingly to meet the needs of our customers.
Note:
EMV® is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries and an unregistered trademark elsewhere. The EMV trademark is owned by EMVCo, LLC.